Yesterday evening, Microsoft quietly added the photo displaying app SeaDragon Mobile, its first-ever iPhone application, to the App Store. Could Microsoft Office for iPhone be far behind? Probably not, but this is a start.

SeaDragon Mobile is pretty much a demo of Microsoft Live Labs' photo display platform (also seen in Photosynth). Users can use the app to zoom in on photos with incredible resolution. The app achieves this by storing different resolutions, and shows only the portions needed at any given time.

When explaining the decision to use the App Store, Alex Daley, group product manager for Microsoft Live Labs, said he was impressed with the iPhone's superior hardware.

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The iPhone is the most widely distributed phone with a (graphics processing unit). Most phones out today don't have accelerated graphics in them. The iPhone does and so it enabled us to do something that has been previously difficult to do. I couldn't just pick up a BlackBerry or a Nokia off the shelf and build Seadragon for it without GPU support.